The advent and rise of electronic messaging and the Internet has been accompanied by the rise of “spam” or “junk mail”, computer viruses, spyware, adware, worms, botnets and other malicious software capable of being delivered by email or other electronic messages, as well as unwanted explicit material, received.
Unsolicited message originators and those who produce malicious code typically attempt to hide their identities when they distribute email or code. Instead of generating messages directly from an easily-traced account at a major Internet provider, they may, for instance, send their mail from a spam-friendly network, using forged headers, and relay the message through intermediate hosts.
It is thus desirable to provide a system and method that identifies, tracks and removes unwanted messages and malicious software, and to identify the network address the malicious software was received from.
Although laws pertaining to unwanted messaging have been enacted, enforcement of such laws is problematic; For example, although an unwanted message originator is supposed to provide an opt-out link for a user to indicate their desire to stop receiving email from a given source, some spammers provide the opt-out in a manner that is not easily usable to a human user.
Therefore, it is also desirable to provide a system and method that writes a message to the sending email domain's web server log or electronic content repository log, and requests that no further messages be sent to the user.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method that writes a message to the reply email domain's web server log or electronic content repository log and requests that no further messages be sent to the user.
It is also desirable to provide a system and method that writes a message to the response web site(s)' web server log or electronic content repository(s)' log and requests that no further messages be sent to the user.